LIFE IMITATING ART

Contagion’s Screenwriter Speaks Out About Ebola Paranoia

Three years after the premiere of Steven Soderbergh’sContagion—the thriller about a fictional global pandemic and the paranoia and hysteria it inspires—the world is facing its own real-life contagion with Ebola. Scott Z. Burns, the screenwriter who conducted extensive research and worked closely with medical experts to create the hauntingly plausible tale, certainly sees parallels behind the film and the real-life onset of media-perpetuated fear we are currently encountering. And in a new interview with the Wrap, Burns offers his own thoughts on Ebola and the mistakes that are being made during the epidemic’s worst outbreak in history.

“What scares me more than Ebola are the more mundane viruses of stupidity and fear and partisan politics,” Burns tells the Wrap. “Those were ideas that Steven and I wanted to communicate in the movie. And it was interesting to see today that CNN was attributing the falloff in the stock market to Ebola fears, because that's something else we talked about when we were doing Contagion.”

He continues: “It's turned into a political problem now,” he said. “People are blaming the Republicans for cutting funding, and other people are now
saying the president also cut funding to the C.D.C. . . . We're placing blame, and that’s just not very helpful.”

Attempting to put Ebola into perspective, Burns offers a somewhat frightening bit of information that he learned during his Contagion interviews. “[W]hen I did my research, all the experts told me that they expected there to be a pandemic of some kind of influenza, like we saw in World War I with Spanish Flu. And this isn't that. This is not what they would call the big one.”

Even though we seem to be making mistakes in the handling of this nearly 40-year-old virus, Burns is hopeful that the world can overcome this epidemic. (Even though it seems like we can’t get through a day without there being a more startling Ebola headline than the day before.)

“We have the science to contain this,” he continues. “There are people in the world today who have stared down Ebola successfully in very difficult places—and I am optimistic that if we support those people and give them the resources they need, this can be contained.”